Treacherous Transparencies: Thoughts and Observations Triggered by a Visit to Farnsworth House

Description

Treacherous Transparencies analyzes transparency as expressed in architecture and art in an attempt to understand the intentions and objectives that underlie its use by pertinent architects and artists. The publication looks at a few important works by selected artists and architects who work with transparency as an artistic strategy, which they implement primarily by using glass and mirrors but other media as well. The architects and artists listed together in this context form an unlikely alliance: Bruno Taut, Ivan Leonidov, Marcel Duchamp, Mies van der Rohe, Dan Graham, and Gerhard Richter. But they do have something in common: their work marks salient way stations in the story of modernism up to the present day.

Jacques Herzog, born in Basel in 1950, studied architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) from 1970 to 1975 with Aldo Rossi and Dolf Schnebli. He was a visiting tutor at Cornell University in 1983, has been a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1989 and since 1994, is a professor at ETH Zurich since 1999, and co-founded the ETH Studio Basel - Contemporary City Institute in 2002. Pierre de Meuron, born in Basel in 1950, studied architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich) from 1970 to 1975 with Aldo Rossi and Dolf Schnebli. He has been a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1989 and since 1994, is a professor at ETH Zurich since 1999, and co-founded the ETH Studio Basel - Contemporary City Institute in 2002.

..". the text is fairly conversational: it is insightful but hardly academic; assertive yet not preachy. Ultimately it [Treacherous Transparencies] serves to deflate the pedestal that Mies has been propped upon for decades, by looking at one of his masterpieces through a different lens." --John Hill, A Daily Dose of Architecture "Architects Herzog & de Meuron respond to Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House while mediating on the power granted and wielded by material transparency. Putting the elevated glass box into conversation with works by other architects and artists, they find that despite his paeans to the unity of man and nature the house reduces nature to decor in service of the Modernist's own artistic ambitions." --Metropolis Magazine "With each successive image, de Meuron's forensic photography makes the [Farnsworth] house strange again in ways that are both unnerving and often profound, intimating a promise paralleled by Herzog's opening text that provocatively calls for a return to a close reading of an already overread villa, liberating Mies's intentions from the house as a tired trope of transparency gone awry." --Journal of Architectural Education "The book, Treacherous Transparencies, argues that the [Farnsworth] house leaves much to be desired and, perhaps worse, that "Mies's statements on architecture are not coherent." It is a rare attack on one of the profession's deities, but Herzog supports his arguments with careful analysis and with de Meuron's incisive, unflattering photos (taken during the 2014 visit and on a return trip in the spring of 2016). . . . it's great that Herzog and de Meuron inspected the house from every angle--and that their large body of work contains so many triumphs that they can critique Mies from a position of strength." --Architectural Record